Nuclear miRNA-mediated gene silencing dependent on Argonaute proteins is required for embryonic stem cell differentiation [4_Cnot shRNA-seq]

Here, we show that embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and muscle stem cells contain high levels of nuclear AGO proteins and that in ESCs nuclear AGO2 protein activity is sufficient to allow for differentiation. Transcriptome-wide mapping of binding sites at nucleotide resolution revealed that nuclear AGO2 expands its target sequence repertoire in a miRNA-dependent manner to include intronic sequences to induce post-transcriptional gene silencing shRNA CNOT1 and CNOT7 and RNA-seq from nuclear fraction